This election year Americans are faced with a difficult decision on how to best move our country forward. Among the proposals to address our economic challenges and federal deficit is one filled with extreme, regressive, and deeply cynical policy choices: that of congressman and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan. The Republican ticket's plan is deeply flawed because it asks the most from the middle class, seniors, and our next generation all while asking nothing - not one red cent - from the wealthiest among us. I believe we can do better, not just for some Americans, but for all. The Congressional Progress Caucus' Budget For All offers concrete, reasonable, and actionable alternatives to the Ryan Budget that will more effectively remedy our economic situation while protecting the country we believe in.

The Ryan Budget asserts that the key to economic growth is not by empowering and strengthening the middle class, but by keeping tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans, adhering to the "trickle down" theory of economics. His plan would cut funding for social programs across the board while instituting massive tax cuts for those at the very top, who will - in theory- create jobs for our nation's struggling economy. This essentially empowers a minority of rich Americans to be responsible for the future of the entire nation, with the hope that they will "pay it forward."

This wishful thinking hasn't come to fruition before, and it won't work now. Conversely, the CPC's Budget For All would achieve $6.8 trillion in deficit reduction and hit the same fiscal benchmarks as the GOP plan over the next decade while still securing the future for all Americans. This plan spurs innovation, creating thousands of jobs in America's fastest growing industry, clean energy. It also creates and saves jobs in the education, public safety, and transportation and infrastructure industries, while still encouraging private sector innovation. It offers support to those with low income and little education, helping them to secure jobs and build a future, and rewards businesses who create jobs here at home instead of overseas.

A pivotal element of the Ryan Budget is reforming our Medicare system by ending the Medicare guarantee and turning it into a voucher-based system. This approach repeals historic patient protections, and would disastrously put health insurance companies back in the driver's seat. Patient care should be determined by the medical needs of an individual, not the profit margins of insurance companies. The CPC's Budget For All offers a better solution to rising health care costs by not only preserving Medicare, but strengthening the program and making it more efficient, while simultaneously improving on the Affordable Care Act with innovative cost-control measures and a public option.

The Ryan Budget poses a threat to our education system and the global competitiveness of future generations of Americans. As a cost-saving step, the Ryan Budget would gut Pell grants, reducing the financial assistance that millions of Americans depend on to help pay for higher education. In order for America to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized society, education must be seen as a necessity for all, not a luxury for some. Unfortunately, Paul Ryan's budget would make earning a college degree a far-flung dream for many Americans, stifling their chances of upward mobility and undermining their chance of achieving the American Dream. America cannot afford Ryan's proposed $11 billion cuts to science, medical research, and space and technology programs over the next two years. Such cuts would irreversibly weaken our ability to complete on a global stage and be leaders on the forefront of new research and technology, a cost that Americans truly cannot afford. The CPC's Budget For All addresses these concerns by investing in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in addition to increasing research funding for science, aeronautics and technology, and advanced manufacturing by $78.1 billion over the next ten years. The Budget For All also proposes historic investments in critical education programs such as Head Start, Title 1, Pell grants, and STEM education in an effort to invest in our future generations and keep America competitive.

How do we save the American Dream? We do it by adopting a budget that moves us forward rather than resorting to cynicism and fear. We must sustain and nourish the future we want to build. We must not adopt radically regressive economics that would push our economic recovery into a downward tail-spin. At this vital point in our history, Paul Ryan's proposed budget offers no progress, protection, or prosperity for Americans. It does not support the crucial social and educational programs that have come to define our great nation as a progressive world leader. It will not create the jobs Americans so desperately need. Indeed, the Ryan Budget would do irrefutable damage to our country's greatest legacies. There are better ways forward. The Budget For All makes the American Dream a reality again, igniting economic recovery, putting Americans back to work, achieving fiscal sustainability, strengthening valued social programs, and allowing opportunity for upward mobility. These are the positive solutions that the Democratic Party believes in, and a vision the American people deserve.

Guest Post written by Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA). Follow him on Twitter at @RepMikeHonda.

A Note from Politix: We want to offer our users high-quality, informed perspectives from outside writers, and are excited to bring you Guest Posts from elected officials, organizations and others. We'd love to make Politix a welcoming place for lawmakers and others to contribute their views, so please help us grow by keeping your comments respectful and on topic.

Is the Ryan Budget good or bad for America?

Trickle down economics hasn't worked for the past 30 years, why would it now? Do they think additional tax cuts will suddenly give the wealthy a sense of patriotism and a conscience? And I have desert bridges for sale! Whoops I sounded capitalist there.

Well, let's look at this argument for w second. Leaving the spin aside, Rep. Honda has pointed out what he believes are deficits in Ryan's plan. With a couple exaggerations, ok. But then he offers only general platitudes as to how his party's plan is better. His plan would create jobs: how? There are no concrete examples of how his plan will close the deficit or reform entitlements. Just more fear. Medicare scare and pellet grants will go away? Pretty much the same old tune. Republicans hate the elderly and the poor.

He is right about one thing, this election us about two very different philosophies. Whether we are serious about deficit reduction and allowing the private sector to grow our economy for the benefit of everyone or whether more govt is the answer. Whether bigger govt programs and hand outs will be our future. Will we truly become the nanny state of govt dependents? Or will we renew the independent American spirit of capitalism that built our economy and our prosperity. Not only did we build it, but we can again, and without big govt. That is the thought that keeps these greedy power mongering progressives awake at night. The Dems fear a country that doesn't need them. Let the entrepreneurs and the hard workers again shine, equal oppportunity is our benchmark, not the smothering fallacy of a security blanket that promotes only the mediocrity of equal results.

I was wondering how the CPC was able to provide all these additional tax credits and expansion of government and I found it...

The story we've been hearing is that Warren Buffet's secretary pays a higher tax rate than her boss. Warren Buffet's secretary is paying a 35% marginal income tax rate while her boss pays the capital gains tax rate of 15%.

The CPC Budget would let Bush's marginal income tax cut expire which would raise taxes on Warren Buffet's secretary and install 5 more brackets on top that inches right up to but not quite HALF.

Now, I understand that the Class Warriors would love this but that doesn't change the fact that nothing would chase wealth and investment out of this country faster than enacting this CPC Budget For All.

So keep raising the burden on the people who are actually working until they strike. Sounds like a good book idea! We'll have the recurring quote "Who is Bobolinsky." We'll call it "The Heavens Shirked"

@armed_liberal - In 2008, the top 1% wage earners ($380k+) paid 38% of the tax burden. The bottom 50% paid 2.7%. Major government expenditures include social security, medicare, medicaid and military. Social Security is a loss for everyone fairly equally until the ceiling rate of $110k+/-, then, because the rich don't have to contribute anymore above that, there is an ability to escape this foolish burden we impose on ourselves (small nonleach). Medicare is paid by an across the board 2.9% tax on payroll. However, if you consider that the payment to doctors that accept Medicare is subpar to private insurance payouts, the rich, who pay with private insurance, actually supplement the elderly who pay with Medicare. This factor will become more pronounced as we shift to the one-payer system (partial leach). Medicaid is a full leach program providing 0 benefits to the rich. Military spending, if taken to be for protection of property, is a 1 to 1 deal. You have x amount in property you've accumulated off of a wage of y which you've paid a percentage of in taxes and that x amount of property is protected by our military (non leach).

All of this is good for discussion, but the clearest example of leach hood would be a poor person who walks our roads, eats our food, gets paid our welfare money and doesn't contribute one cent towards the funding of our government.

@DerivePI Fair enough. Sort of like how the profit motive is the best engine of economic growth. A "created job" is an effect of having too much work and too little time to do all that needs done to make that profit. That ain't a bad thing. And neither is educating liberals;-)

Congressman Honda - You write very persuasively, but the record of achievement of your fellow Democrats during the two years that you held both houses of Congress and the Presidency gives the lie to your economic claims. You had the chance then to show America how your economic philosophy could help lift the country out of recession, and you failed.

You claim trickle-down economic does not work, yet the record of economic growth during the Reagan years suggests otherwise. I would also ask you to tell us how many jobs have ever been created by poor people.

Paul Ryan's budget may not be perfect, but it certainly shows more promise than your party which failed to pass any kind of budget whatsoever. Congressman, your analysis of Ryan's proposals before they have been tried may or may not be correct, but the record of Congressional Democrats is fact. And facts are stubborn things.

I have one word : arithmetic. It's not like the top 5% are in trouble this moment. Actually they're richer than ever for the past decade. Corporate profits are at an all time high. Do you feel the trickle down effect? Do you? Probably not unless you build yachts for a living.

Your hair should be on fire because the same cast of neo fascists corporatists that have thrown hundreds of millions of Americans out of work is well on the way to bringing the Chinese Oligarchy to Amerika. The key players in the plot; right wingers in finance and corporatists like the Koch brothers.

For those of you who think this is so farfetched simply look at China today. Who could have imagined that in a span of time less than a generation China went from Mao to oligarchy?

China basically replaced a centralized crony party system with a series of insider Capitalist cronies. The enabling factor was that as where Mao refused to trade with the west the oligarchs quickly realized that 150 million Chinese laborers working for less than 30 cents an hour was an economic force too powerful to deny for greedy late stage capitalist like the Kochs and the Schaifs.

You might take some comfort in that we no longer fear the massive Communist world takeover because China today is our friend not to mention our most important trading power. Besides, you don’t have to live in that largely crap hole world so, as long as you can buy cheap Chinese made junk at WalMart, who cares? But that crap hole world is on its way to you now and it is right on schedule.

The grand strategy of the Republican /Corporatist (neo-fascist) is to generate the economic crisis that will facilitate the arrival of oligarchy. When it does what is left of the recovery will convert to a 1930’s style depression. It will be epic and ugly. There will be massive civil unrest that will enable the fine print in the Patriot Act to deal with the angry masses. When the SWAT Team throws a flash-bang grenade into your bedroom at 3:00am in the morning – let me know how well your right to own as many guns as you like works out.

Realistically the in the first phase of the takeover, the oligarchs want controlled crisis – enough to force the sale and privatization of everything that is in the public sphere. Your wages will continue downward to a bottom that makes us competitive with Chinese laborers when you include the shipping cost of goods.

What’s the solution? Well you can buy us a few more years if you elect Obama. If you go with the Romney the oligarch scenario will engage within his second year in office. The choice is yours…

By the way in 2007 when I predicted the housing collapse of epic proportion all the right wing trolls here at Topix said I was wrong then too.

Thank you! You have hit the nail on the head. There will be widespread suffering and protests which is what the republicans want. I know and am related to many republicans who have voiced a desire for a situation much like you describe. Unbelieveably scary!

@Gilbert You may be right, George was not a fiscal conservative by any stretch, although he did have 9/11,Katrina and the war...You can't restore the American Dream by spending Trillions more dollars, you have to stop the bleeding,he hasn't done that, rather has tripled spending, you can't spend your way out of debt! Ask any financial expert, you can't.

@mimi57 We agree to disagree. Because Obama has no other choice after Bush in the current atmosphere of government gridlock.. Plus, your calculation of Bush's spending compared to Obama's is fuzzy math at best. And you can't dismiss the poor demand in current economic conditions after the crash that inevitably happened at the end of Bush's reign. The Greedy Old Party will only champion failed, trickle-down economic ideas of the past.http://politix.topix.com/homepage/1969-republ...

How did we ever wind up with trickle down economics in the first place?

Even if there was some merit to the idea, why didn't we attach strings and say you only get the tax cuts if you create jobs (specifically AMERICAN jobs NOT Chinese jobs)? If it's effective to create jobs to give tax cuts to the rich because some of them use the money to create new jobs, then logically it would be even more effective if the only people who got the tax cuts were people who used the money that way.

The CBO findings are not favorable to Ryan's proposed budget. I have read it and agree with the CBO and much of what is in that document butchers the very support many Red states rely upon. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php...

Depends which dream we are having. The democrat- pinko socialist utopia is a nightmare to me. Democrats are just socialists who dont have the backbone to tell everyone what they really are, communists. Joseph McCarthy was right, and evidence of it is at cbs, nbc, abc, the n.e.a, the public workers union, certain members of congress and the senate, judgeships, I could go on for another 10 paragraphs ad nauseam but I wont, because the republican revolution is only a few weeks away now, thank GOD!!!!

First, the Ryan budget is nothing more than the Republican party's budget rebadged as being the brainchild of Ryan who has agreed to be the political scapegoat for his party because he is literally bulletproof from a reelection defeat in his RINO/TINO-packed Congressional district. Many republicans support the measure, privately or otherwise, as they know it will be Ryan that takes the blame and pays the political price, if any at all, instead of themselves. Ryan is merely taking advantage of a pack of RINOs/TINOs who are too spineless to present this budget as their own.

Likewise, Ryan, too, was utterly spineless as he voted unhesitatingly for each and every deficit-laden Bush budget for the first 8 years of this century.

The Republican budget is deceivingly simple as it seeks to dismantle Medicare for everyone born after 1957 while forcing these fresh shaftees to continue paying the full and infinite Medicare tax of 1.45% of income by employees and employers alike or a full 2.9% by the self-employed while giving them a worthless voucher when it is their turn to retire.

Under this scheme, the life expectancy of retirees born 1957 and earlier could easily surpass those born in later years because the latter may very well be financially ill-equipped to provide for their own medical needs in retirement.

Even more glaring is the hypocrisy of Republicans who chastise Obama for wanting to engage in class warfare by insisting on tax hikes for the very wealthy while Republicans have chosen to split the electorate differently by favoring those born prior to 1957 in this Medicare scheme which coincidentally and conspicuously contains about 45% of all Republican voters.

Ryan is a joke and a loser which is likely why Romney chose him from the start.

The Ryan plan is a good plan, and an actual tangible plan, but I don't know that I would call it the RIGHT plan. You congressional idiots all need to put aside you politics, and start thinking in terms of the Americans who EMPLOY YOU, and SOLVE the country's problems! THAT is why we pay you your outrageously high salaries, not to mention your OBSCENELY RICH benefit levels!!! You ought to all be ashamed of putting politics before the people. At least Mr. Ryan is putting the tough issues on the table, whereas so many of you want to simply push the issue down the road.